What do you get when you combine the sensuality of French filmromance with perhaps the most notorious erotic fantasy in classic English literature?
Oooh la la! It’s a “Lady Chatterley” to swoon for — as heightened by painterly cinematography, two unaffected lead lovers and the forbidden titillations of a luxuriant period piece.
Leave it to the French. There’s wistful pouting and total nudity just 12 minutes into this subtitled 165-minute interpretation of D. H. Lawrence’s early 20th-century love story between an unfulfilled aristocratic young wife (Marina Hands) and the brawny gamekeeper (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h) working on her disabled husband’s country estate. But the ensuing full-frontal affair seems only lush and tasteful — if a tad sluggish sometimes — in the hands of director and co-writer Pascale Ferran.
The filmmaker has chosen to adapt what was originally referred to as “John Thomas and Lady Jane,” which is the second of three versions Lawrence wrote of his famous “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” It’s no accident that Ferran’s translation removes “lover” from the title since her “Lady Chatterley,” winner of five Cesar Awards (the Oscar equivalent in France), emphasizes the arc of self-actualization of the female protagonist Constance.
Her World War I veteran husband Sir Clifford (Hippolyte Girardot) is not only paralyzed from the waist down, he’s also a depressive jerk. Constance is his subservient nurse. But all around her on their idyllic lands (and within her own womb), the coming of spring is urging the flora and fauna to want to, er, blossom.
In the most emblematic moment from nearly every past screen version of the tale, Constance secretly spies gruff gameskeeper Oliver Parkin washing himself topless in the woods. His enormous, bulging lats and the splendor of nature set her loins into motion. She reconsiders the direction of her dreary life. Soon, impossible class differences and the irresistible pull of instinctive human animal desire begin to play off each other, intensifying the naughty if inevitable liaison. Then, as it often does, physical combustion ignites real emotion.
But what’s a noble Lady to do when she starts to fancy the help?
Hands and Coulloc’h not only look like authentically de-glamorized examples of the bygone era they represent. They also stir a genuine sexual energy together.
Filmmaker Ferran does attempt to add some social relevance to their bodice-ripping friskiness. The script directly addresses the larger implications of the class upheavals that were set off in Europe at that time between the wars.
But, let’s face it, this “Lady Chatterley” is about what it has always been about: the passion. In whatever language and however elegantly it is mounted, it’s still soft core without the shame.
‘Lady Chatterley’
4/5 stars
Starring: Marina Hands, Jean-Louis Coulloc’h
Director: Pascale Ferran
Not rated
» In French with English subtitles.
